Gallipoli (45 page)

On August 17 Murdoch wrote to Hamilton from Cairo saying that he was finding it difficult to complete his inquiries in Egypt. He asked for permission to come to Gallipoli, and added, ‘I
should like to go across in only a semi-official capacity, so that I might record censored impressions in the London and Australian newspapers I represent, but any conditions you impose I should,
of course, faithfully observe. . . . May I add that I had the honour of meeting you at the Melbourne Town Hall, and wrote fully of your visit in the
Sydney Sun
and
Melbourne
Punch
;
²⁹
also may I say
that my anxiety as an Australian to visit the sacred shores of Gallipoli while our army is there is
intense.’

Hamilton says that he was not much impressed at having been written up in the
Sun
and
Punch
, but he sent off the necessary permission and on September 2 Murdoch arrived.
Hamilton, at their single meeting, found him ‘a sensible man’. He was to prove, however, much more than that: so far as Hamilton was concerned he was a very dangerous man.

Murdoch signed the usual war correspondent’s declaration saying that he would submit all he wrote to the censor at headquarters, and then made a brief visit to the Anzac bridgehead. On his
return to Imbros he set up at the Press Camp, and there found Ashmead-Bartlett. The two at once discovered that they had much in common.

Murdoch had been genuinely appalled by what he had heard and seen at Anzac: the danger and the squalor of the men’s lives, the sickness, the monotonous food, the general air of depression.
The Australians he talked to were extremely critical of G.H.Q., and they said that they dreaded the approach of winter. Ashmead-Bardett was able to corroborate all this and add a good deal more. He
gave it as his opinion that a major catastrophe was about to occur unless something was done. The authorities and the public at home, he said, were in complete ignorance of what was going on, and
under the existing censorship at Imbros there was no way of enlightening them—unless, of course, one broke the rules and sent out an uncensored letter. After some discussion they agreed that
this must be done. Murdoch was due to leave for England in a day or two; it was arranged that he would take a letter written by Ashmead-Bartlett and get it into the hands of the authorities in
London.

While they were waiting for the next ship for Marseilles, Ashmead-Bartlett wrote his letter, and then coached Murdoch very fully in the mistakes and dangers of the campaign so that Murdoch would
be able to furnish information on his own account on his arrival in London. ‘I further,’ Ashmead-Bartlett says in his book
The Uncensored Dardanelles
, ‘gave Murdoch
letters
of introduction to others who might be useful in organizing a campaign to save the Army on Gallipoli, and arranged for him to see Harry Lawson
³⁰
to urge him to allow me to return. I promised him that if he was held up in his mission, or if the authorities refused to listen to his warnings, I would at once resign and
join forces with him in London.’

Early in the second week of September Murdoch set off. When he arrived at Marseilles a few days later he was met on the quay by a British officer with an escort of British troops and French
gendarmes. They proceeded to place him under arrest, and it was not until he had handed over Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter that he was released and allowed to go on his way to London.

Long afterwards, when the war was over, Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch learned how they were given away: they had been overheard in their discussions at Imbros by another correspondent, (Henry
Nevinson) who sent a letter to Hamilton warning him of what was afoot. Hamilton was inclined to be amused at first, and he wrote, ‘I had begun to wonder what had come over Mr. Murdoch and now
it seems he has come over me!’ But he acted very quickly. A cable was sent off to the War Office in London asking them to intercept Murdoch on his journey; and on September 28
Ashmead-Bartlett at Imbros was sent for by Braithwaite and told that he must leave the Army.

Hamilton’s informant had been wrong in one respect. The letter had not been addressed to Lawson as he thought, but to Asquith, the Prime Minister. Hamilton was not dismayed when he heard
this news from London: ‘I do not for one moment believe Mr. Asquith would employ such agencies and for sure he will turn Murdoch and his wares into the wastepaper basket. . . . Tittletattle
will effect no lodgement in the Asquith brain.’

But here again he was wrong, for Murdoch had by no means given up the hunt. He had lost Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, but he had his own pen. On his arrival in England he wrote an 8,000-word
report on Gallipoli, and addressed it to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher. Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter, which was
now safely pouched in the War Office, had
said that Hamilton and his staff were openly referred to by the troops at Gallipoli with derision, and that morale in the Army had collapsed; but this was the mildest pin-pricking compared with the
views that Murdoch now disclosed. Part of his report was a eulogy of the Australian soldiers: his criticism was reserved for the English. Braithwaite, he informed the Australian Prime Minister, was
‘more cordially detested in our forces than Enver Pasha’. Birdwood ‘had not the fighting qualities or the big brain of a great general’. Kitchener ‘has a terrible task
in getting pure work from the General Staff of the British Army, whose motives can never be pure, for they are unchangeably selfish’. Murdoch had seen one of Hamilton’s staff officers
‘wallowing’ in ice while wounded men were dying of heat a few hundred yards away. As for the British soldiers of the New Army, they were ‘merely a lot of childish youths without
strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions’. One would refuse to believe that these could be British soldiers at all, their physique was so much below that of the Turks.
‘From what I saw of the Turk,’ the report went on, ‘I am convinced he is . . . a better man than those opposed to him.’

On the question of the morale of the soldiers Murdoch was equally trenchant. ‘Sedition,’ he wrote, ‘is talked around every tin of bully beef on the peninsula.’ And again,
‘I shall always remember the stricken face of a young English lieutenant when I told him he must make up his mind for a winter campaign.’ And finally, ‘I do not like to dictate
this sentence, even for your eyes, but the fact is that after the first day at Suvla an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldier who lagged behind or loitered in an
advance.’

There was perhaps some excuse for this amazing document, despite the fact that Murdoch had been only for a few hours at the front and could hardly have seen very much of the Turks. Overstatement
is not such a rare thing in time of war, and any journalist would recognize here the desire to tell a good story, to present the facts in the most brisk and colourful way.

To the inexperienced and confident eye of a young man who
had been brought up in a remote dominion, who knew very little about other kinds of people and their ways, and
still less about war, this first sight of the battlefield had been a terrible thing; and no doubt Murdoch was genuinely indignant. He felt that it was his duty to break ‘the conspiracy of
silence’ on Imbros.

And there was some substance in the report; not in the frantic and reckless details about sedition and the shooting of lagging soldiers, but in the general theme. G.H.Q. was being criticized,
things had been mismanaged, and Murdoch was telling the plain truth when he said so. At all events, it was the truth as he saw it, and in wartime there is a definite place for the reports of fresh
eyewitnesses of this kind. They serve to remind politicians and headquarters planners that they are dealing with human beings who in the end are much more important than machines and elaborate
plans. Such documents can hardly be used as state papers, as evidence upon which policy can be decided, and Murdoch’s letter should have remained what it was—a private letter to his
Government which required checking from other sources.

But Lloyd George saw it. It is only fair to assume that Lloyd George was sincerely moved by its terms, but he was also an opponent of Lord Kitchener, and he had always preferred Salonika to
Gallipoli. He urged Murdoch to send a copy to Mr. Asquith.

If up to this point an explanation can be made of Murdoch’s motives, it is more difficult to find an excuse for the action which the Prime Minister now took. He did not send the report to
Hamilton for his comments. He did not wait until Kitchener had studied it. He had it printed as a state paper on the duck-egg blue stationery of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and circulated it
to the members of the Dardanelles Committee. This was the paper they had before them, when on October 11 they decided to send either Haig or Kitchener to Gallipoli to find out what Hamilton and his
headquarters were up to. This was the origin of the ‘flow of unofficial reports’ about which Kitchener had warned Hamilton earlier in the week.

On this same day, too, October 11, Ashmead-Bartlett arrived in London fresh from his dismissal from G.H.Q. at Imbros. He
lost no time in seeing Lord Northcliffe, the
proprietor of
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, and in making arrangements for a full, uncensored exposure of the Gallipoli question in the columns of the
Sunday Times.
Both
Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett were very busy in Whitehall and Fleet Street during the next few days, and it soon became known that they had Northcliffe’s backing. Northcliffe by now was
convinced that Gallipoli must be evacuated.

On October 14 the Dardanelles Committee assembled again, and Hamilton’s reply to Kitchener’s evacuation cable was put before them. It was, as they feared, an unhelpful and depressing
message—merely this despondent reference to losses of fifty per cent. Churchill was still for supporting Gallipoli, but with the failure of the August battles his reputation had taken a
further downward plunge—after all, was he not the author of the whole disastrous adventure?—and the Salonika group was very active. They insisted that Hamilton should go. It was left to
Kitchener to break the news to him.

At Gallipoli the weather had turned bitterly cold, and October 15 on Imbros was a depressing day. Headquarters was on the point of moving across to winter quarters on the other side of the
island. A new stone shack, something like a Greek shepherd’s hut, had been built for Hamilton, and he was sleeping in his tent for the last time. He was already in bed when an officer came to
him with a message from Kitchener marked ‘Secret and Personal’, telling him that when the next message arrived he should decipher it himself. Hamilton had a fair idea of what this next
message was going to be, but he allowed himself one final gesture. No, he said, he did not want to be woken when the message came in: it was to be brought to him at the usual hour in the
morning.

Next day the message was put before him, and he got to work with the cipher book and the device like a bowstring which was used for decoding cables. Word by word he spelled out:

‘The War Council held last night decided that though the Government fully appreciate your work and the gallant manner in which you personally have struggled to make the enterprise a
success in face of the terrible difficulties you have had to contend against, they, all the same, wish to make a change in the command which will give them an opportunity of
seeing you.’

General Sir Charles Monro, one of the Army commanders on the Western front, was to supersede him, and Monro was to bring out a new chief-of-staff in place of Braithwaite. Birdwood was to be in
temporary command until Monro arrived. Perhaps, the message added, Hamilton might like to visit Salonika and Egypt on his way home so that he could make a report on those places.

No, he decided, he would not like to visit either Egypt or Salonika. He would go home at once and tell them that it was still not too late. Let them send Kitchener out to take command with an
adequate force—a force that would hardly be missed in France—and they would have Constantinople within one month. He would buttonhole every Minister from Lloyd George to Asquith, grovel
at their feet if necessary, and persuade them that Gallipoli was not lost. They could still win.

It was another cold and windy day. Birdwood and the other Corps Commanders came over to the island to say good-bye, and Hamilton was grateful to the French for their lightness of touch. There
was a farewell dinner with de Robeck and Keyes in the
Triad
, and on the following day a last ride across the island for a last word with the staff. In the afternoon with Braithwaite and
his A.D.C’s he went aboard the cruiser
Chatham
which was to take him home. He was very tired. Now that it was all over it was a little too much to remain on deck and watch Imbros
fade from view, and he went down to his cabin. Presently, however, when the anchor was weighed, a message was sent to him from de Robeck asking him to come up on to the quarter-deck of the
Chatham
, and because he had never wanted for courage he felt bound to go. As he came on deck he found the
Chatham
steering on a corkscrew course between the anchored vessels of
the Fleet. And as he passed each ship the sailors stood and cheered him on his way.

L
IEUT
.-G
ENERAL
S
IR
C
HARLES
M
ONRO
had already achieved
something of a reputation as a cool and determined commander on the western front when he went out to Gallipoli. He was fifty-five, a methodical and authoritative man, one of the kind who accepts
the rules and excels in them. There was nothing speculative about him, nothing amateur. Of all the generals who served at Gallipoli one is most tempted to compare him with Liman von Sanders, for he
had the same dispassionate and professional air, the same aura of calm responsibility. ‘He was born,’ Hamilton wrote, ‘with another sort of mind from me.’